Man selling Sheep Skulls
A couple of stops in towards the centre of the city from here is Red Town at Hongqiao Lu metro station. I went yesterday to have a look. At the entrance was a man selling the skull and horns of several sheep. I wasn’t disturbed by this, in fact I thought he was very enterprising, considering what happens at Red Town. It’s my son Charlie’s sort of place and I could see him being enticed by such a set of bones. I surmised that it is called Red Town as it is on the site of an old steel works. Some of the associated industrial archaeology still lies around the place and the big steel works buildings now make fantastic large venues to display art. You never know what an artist might do with the skull of a sheep with impressively curling horns. Charlie would love this place.
Foundry ladle
Rolling Mill awaiting Curation
Some of the large buildings have been split into venues for creative businesses, such as a haute couture place that was making made to measure dresses and a hair dressing academy. This is also the venue for a number of independent art galleries, shops and trendy cafes. One of the oldest professional galleries in Shanghai is located in Red Town, the Shanghai Hwas Gallery, which was showing a series of
Shanghai Hwas Gallery
plant paintings based on the dispersal seeds similar to dandelion clocks, and which shows work from major Chinese artists such as Chen Yifei, Luo Zhongyi and Ai Xuan. We had met a Korean American lady, who lectures Art History at Jiatong University, the previous week and she was very enthusiastic about the quality of modern art work being produced nowadays in China.
Now, no stretch of anyone’s imagination would make me into an expert in art, and there is much modern art, no matter where it is in the world, that makes me want to call out that the emperor has no clothes. And in some of the galleries in Red Town that was the case.
Exposed Washing Machine
A Myriad of Metal Pots
Someone had opened up a washing machine
Vodka Bottles in a Display Cabinet
to expose the inner workings. For me this is an exercise in electrical engineering, not art. Someone else had put a vast number of metal pots on the floor and filled some of them with water and another artwork was a cupboard full of empty vodka bottles. My son who nearly went to art college to do an art degree would argue with me that this is all art. In some people’s opinion it may be. But unless your name is Saatchi you might only buy this stuff because you think it is going to go up in value and you hope you can sell it onto some greater fool before the market crashes. If you are Saatchi you just give it away.
All this is giving the impression that there was little good art here, but in my opinion there was. A series of
Series of striped paintings
paintings in a gallery reminded me of a couple of paintings my graphic-artist aunt painted for her brother and which hang in his widow’s flat in Edinburgh to this day. She had knocked the paintings up pretty quickly as she had done it as a “what this wall needs is a painting” exercise back in the sixties.
But what Red Town is really all about is the Shanghai Sculpture Space. And most of the work displayed here was impressive, whether it was displayed in the outside sculpture garden or inside in the exhibition centre.
Sculpture Garden
The Shanghai Sculpture Space
Sculpting In Time Cafe
Iced orange and oolong tea
Red Town also has its fair share of cafés and at the end of my visit I went to the Sculpting In Time café and had an orange iced oolong tea to cool me down, it being 29C outside at the end of March.
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